I didn’t want to derail the other thread with a few questions, so I thought I would ask them here.
So many of the stories, the women told their mother or father and the parent got mad at THEM, or didn’t believe them or brushed it off.
How the hell can a parent do that? I just don’t get it. If my daughter, or son, came to me with the information that somebody raped or assaulted them, why the ever-loving hell would I get mad at THEM? That’s just so different from my world view that I’m having trouble understanding it.
and 2) For the women whose parents didn’t take it seriously or got mad or whatever, do you still talk to that parent or did you still talk to them, after you became an adult?
Addressing your first question, and only speaking as an observer, relationships are tricky. We commit to people places and things, and make them central to ourselves. When something threatens stability, our brains and emotions often work overtime to maintain the status quo. It feels like it should be obvious: “ditch the abuser, save the child,” but at the same time the conflict between “attempt to maintain the status quo” and “bring my world crashing down by addressing an issue that may end my family and my life as I know it” is going on, and just because option #2 is the obvious moral choice doesn’t mean it’s easy to make. And we are always good at convincing ourselves that the status quo is the obvious right choice to make choice to make, even when the consequences of change are a lot less scary than dealing with an abuser in the family or community.
Everyone, except the perp, is contaminated with the guilt, shame, humiliation, and general soiling of sexual abuse. Not just the victim. One can blame parents, but they are just recoiling from the same thing the victim is, in their own way. No, it isn’t excusable at all, but I think it is understandable.
This is just the other side of the emotion which leads men to “avenge” their womenfolk – blotting out the stain with violence.
While I feel for children who are let down by their guardians in a most horrible way, I am comforted by the fact that morality and judgement is not as black and white as you imagine it to be.
[Annotation. The above was not intended to imply that the latter thought comforts me about the former. Only that I do not think the actions of the parent who doesn’t take action to defend their child is always as sinister as implied by JB99.]
she’s solipsistic. She doesn’t perceive the rest of the world as people, as individuals with their own lifes and agency. We’re just guests in her life, atrezzo in the universal show that she and only she inhabits. This goes triple for her children. And any time anybody says something off-script we’re breaking those fake walls.
yes. Partly because, stealing a line from my cousin to her mother’s second husband “I don’t do it for you, I do it for me”; partly because my brothers and I have been able to educate her slowly and to use her own influence on others to Do Good. Hey, she spent decades looking at me as a clothes-iron with legs; me using her as a publicity billboard is perfectly fair turnabout, specially since I do it in a way that still gets her the admiration that she craves so much.
Also, by sticking around I’ve been able to warn my brothers about certain upcoming situations; after a couple of instances of them not believing me and then she doing exactly as I’d predicted, now if I say “Mom’s gonna sneeze” they say “gesuu…” and pause for the “ndeit”. This has included being able to warn about certain behaviors around my nephews: my brothers knowing what to be on the lookout for has protected my nephews.
IMO yes. Heck, IMO it would be better if she was placed in a glass box atop a mountain and the key thrown away. Re-heck: IMO, neither her nor her sister should have let their children have any contact with their parents in the first place. But my refusing all contact with her would have just turned me into the bad guy. I would just have been That Selfish Bitch while they continued their relationships with her. 1.SiL already thinks I’m completely selfish because how dare I not have children: I already raised two and you’re married to one of them, you imbecilic moron.
In a way I’m still trying to do what I’ve tried to do my whole life: keep the family going, protect my brothers, and now my nephews.
I couldn’t speak to the “not believing” part. As for the other, it is possible to be angry with your child for doing something stupid or irresponsible even if they got hurt for doing it, and sometimes - not always, sometimes - that’s what was going on.
If my 15 year old daughter got drunk and crashed the car and was injured, I would be horrified that she was injured, and horrified that she got drunk and crashed the car. If my 15 year old daughter went to a party without my permission, that I didn’t know about, where there were no adults, and got assaulted, I would be horrified that she was assaulted, and horrified that she went to a party that I didn’t know about where there was drinking and no adults present.
That’s sort of how I felt too, until reading some stuff on here. The point being, blaming the child or getting mad will just force them to NOT say anything if it happens again. And I’d rather know my child was being hurt MORE than I’d want to be mad at them.
In my case, I told a relative that another relative had been touching me. I was telling this to a woman whose daughter had once been raped, so I imagine groping seemed like pretty small potatoes in comparison. Her response was basically that having a certain other relative find out about the situation would spark a real shitstorm, and she wasn’t wrong about that.
I resolved the situation myself the next time it happened, by threatening the person with a knife.
And here I think you’ve got to the crux of the issue.
It’s much easier for people to turn their fear and anger onto the child right in front of them, because they are under their control and the parent retains some power.
My ex fell out with her parents for decades because as a teenager she was raped, and her parents turned their anger on her. They were ashamed of her for going to the wrong place, dressed in the wrong outfit, with the wrong boys. She was a ‘slut’. Clearly they were terribly distressed, and my friend was standing right in front of them, a convenient sound board for their anger.
Not all parents who get angry at their child in such a situation are monsters. But “not all” is paltry consolation, because unfortunately too many really are monsters. Just because “the world is not all black and white” (which is true and important), it doesn’t follow that “there is no right and wrong”.